Turn Around Slowly If You Hear, `Look What The Dog Brought Home!'

Death Finders

You Might Not Want To See What These Dogs Are Trained To Fetch

Maybe it's the location, an old burial ground in Bozrah with dead dating back to the Revolutionary War.

Maybe it's the local legend about a man who murdered a local girl and was buried there, down by the stream, standing up so he'd have no rest.

Maybe it's the day, slate gray and fiercely cold, with a wind that flies across the land and searches for a seam in your clothes and rakes your bones.

Maybe it's the fact that the dogs, one by one, are going off to search for a mythical cadaver, named Matilda for conversational purposes, but actually an ex-Sage Allen mannequin treated with Pseudo Corpse, a commercial preparation that chemically simulates the smell of a body.

But this is a little creepy.

Juno, a huge Newfoundland with long, luxuriant black fur, is watching the other search dogs shamble, one by one, across an open stretch of graveyard and up to an old stone wall. They go over the wall and into the woods, to find Matilda. Juno watches very intently.

Alice Kugelman, Juno's owner, jokes with Andy Rebmann, a retired state trooper and arguably the best man in America at teaching dogs to look for bodies, about the possibility that Juno is cheating, watching the routes taken by the other dogs to get an inkling of where to start looking.

Is this possible? Could Juno be cheating?

No, says Rebmann. They don't think that way.

When Juno's turn comes, though, she makes her sweeps in narrower arcs than the previous dogs, who are, with their owners, all staying in Connecticut for two weeks, up from Virginia to drink from Rebmann's water dish of wisdom.

At the wall, Juno pops her nose up once, crosses into the woods and finds Matilda right away. ("You're damn right she was cheating," Kugelman murmurs later.)

When dog and owner return, Rebmann asks a few questions.

"She alerted this side of the wall and went right in," says Kugelman.

"Did she come back for food?" Rebmann asks.

"No, she didn't do a very good re-find," says Kugelman.

A little body-search lingo there. A dog "alerts" when she informs her owner that she's caught a specific scent. An alert may consist of barking or pointing the snout up suddenly. The "re-find" is sort of a confirmation. The dog returns to the handler and points to the pocket containing the standard reward for good work (toys for the Virginia dogs, food for Juno, who doesn't like toys). Then the dog returns to the find and points it out again, before getting her treat. Kugelman, 56, is one of Connecticut's best-known consultants, speakers and writers on the subject of antiques. Until quite recently, she thought she was not the outdoorsy type. She sits on many civic boards and is quite comfortable lecturing on 18th century case furniture.

To see Kugelman standing in the woods on a viciously cold November afternoon chatting familiarly with a couple of cops about recent cadaver discoveries is to realize that anything in this life is possible.

Visit Kugelman at her West Hartford home, and she pulls out a sheaf of clippings about recent body searches, some of which she has participated in and some of which she follows as a point of avocational interest.

And sooner or later, the talk swings around to John R. Drobot, the missing Ansonia police officer who disappeared in September, apparently into a 5,000-acre reservoir in New Britain, after a fatal hit-and-run accident to which his car has been linked.

After several massive and intense searches, opinions are divided between those who still believe Drobot killed himself in the woods and those who believe he is still alive.

"I'm absolutely committed to John Drobot and to his family," says Kugelman.

Kugelman volunteered herself and Juno on the second day of the search for Drobot. She has been there many times since, long after the police and the flashy out-of-state search teams gave up the hunt. She never knew Drobot, but on her many visits to the area to search with Juno, she has encountered his friends and loved ones.

Most recently, Kugelman and Rebmann brought the Virginia visitors out there on a rainy Wednesday. They found nothing, but one of the dogs, a German shepherd, went into a massive alert in one area of the reservoir, so Kugelman plans to return and focus her efforts there.

"I don't know if the answer is out there," she says.

When Kugelman's friends and acquaintances hear that she is heading off for some cadaver training or perhaps even to search for a real person who is lost and probably dead, every last one of them makes a face, she says.

"We love Angela Lansbury [in "Murder, She Wrote"]; we love Agatha Christie," Kugelman muses. "That's at one level. But when you approach the reality, we're just not wired to deal with it."

In September 1991, Kugelman and Juno went to Montana for search and rescue training that included loading the 110-pound dog onto helicopters and ski lifts. They trained for eight arduous days at the Black Paws Search, Rescue and Avalanche program, where they were drilled in wilderness searches, water searches for drowning